This Week's Revivals

By Richard von Busack

Alice Adams/Holiday
(1935/1938) Booth Tarkington's novel, a
hurting comedy of Midwestern snobbery,
is the direct template for Pretty in Pink;
the film stars Katharine Hepburn as the
poor, small-town girl trying to rise above.
More about this anon. George Stevens
directs, and Fred Stone co-stars as the
shiftless father: "Played with a good rough
edge but an eye tending to slide off to the
camera crew to see how they're taking
it," wrote critic Otis Ferguson. BILLED
WITH Holiday, George Cukor's drama
about a wealthy, boyish heiress (played
by Hepburn) who travels to broaden
herself. Cary Grant co-stars, with the highprincipled
Lew Ayres and Edward Everett
Horton. (Plays May 16-17 in Palo Alto
at the Stanford Theatre.)

My Country, My Country
(2006) Laura Poitras' study of Dr. Riyadh,
a Sunni political candidate who is prodemocracy
and anti-occupation in the
newly democratic Iraq. Poitras spent eight
months following Riyadh as he tends his
family, as well as the dozens of wounded
pouring into his office. She also interviews
U.S. military and privately hired security
contractors. (Plays May 11 at 7:30pm in Palo
Alto at Unitarian Hall, Unitarian Universalist
Church of Palo Alto, 505 E. Charleston; www.
worldcentric.org.)

The Philadelphia Story/A Bill of
Divorcement
(1940/1932) The Henry Luce-like
publisher of Spy magazine (meant to be
Life magazine) forces an idealistic novelistturned-
reporter ( Jimmy Stewart) to
cover a high-society wedding. His entry is
vouchsafed by another Spy employee—the
bride's self-amused, dissolute ex-husband
(Cary Grant). All this would seem like
hard cheese for the bride, except that
the frigidness and brittleness of heiress
Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) is all too
well known by the male members of her
family. In developing this film from her
Broadway hit, and in implicitly critiquing
her image as a slender art deco vial of boxoffice
poison, Hepburn saved her movie
career. Here she shows her erotic side, in
a shadowy two-shot of herself, tousled
and tipsy, hiding in a carriage with Grant.
Director George Cukor's film is a peak of
cinematic elegance during the Hollywood
studio age. Rarely did Grant get to rebound
off a male star who was in his league, as he
does here with Stewart. While essentially
a slice of cake, it's rich with implications of
Hollywood's conflicting attitudes toward
the class structure in America. It represents
the coda of an era in movies when playboys
and women in sequined gowns sauntered
through the movies with cocktail glasses
in hand. Here, these figures of the leisure
class confront the discontent of people who
had to fight their way up from the bottom.
BILLED WITH A Bill of Divorcement. Once,
Bugs Bunny asked Elmer Fudd, "Is there
any insanity in your family?" The rabbit
picked up that line from the movie, which teamed Hepburn (debuting) and John Barrymore as her trembling father in a faithful version of Clemence Dane's play about a hereditary taint staining some members of the upper class. (Plays May 11-13 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)